Semifat Sediment

• Brave New Hair | fxguide
  ‘To address the curls themselves there is a core thread or curve that runs through the middle of a primary curl. The key hairs are B-splines that are then used to interpolate the motion of the rest of the hairs. So Merida had 1500 hand placed curves which interpolate to some 111,000 curves at final render. Merida’s hair was simulated at about 20 to 30 seconds a frame.’
• Technology – Daniel C. Dennett – ‘A Perfect and Beautiful Machine’: What Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Reveals About Artificial Intelligence – The Atlantic
  ‘What Darwin and Turing had both discovered, in their different ways, was the existence of competence without comprehension.’

Links via http://delicious.com/joshleejosh/

• Symbolset
  ‘Symbolsets are semantic symbol fonts. They work in modern browsers and anywhere OpenType features are supported.’
• Inside Minority Report’s ‘Idea Summit,’ Visionaries Saw the Future | Underwire | Wired.com
  ‘The year was 1999, and Steven Spielberg was preparing to turn Philip K. Dick’s short story “The Minority Report” into a $100 million action movie…. So Spielberg convened an ad hoc think tank: He invited a small group of the foremost thinkers in science and technology, along with a handful of people involved with the movie, to hang out for a weekend and talk about the future.’
• Satellite Eyes
  ‘A simple Mac app that automatically changes your desktop wallpaper to the satellite view of where you are, right now.’
• Pew Research Asian Americans Survey | Pew Social & Demographic Trends
• New University of the Arts London Logo, or Why I Hate Helvetica – Brand New
  ‘Helvetica is the fixed-gear bike of typefaces: it’s as basic as it gets, but the statement it makes is as complex as anything else.’
• Asians Surpass Hispanics as Biggest Immigrant Wave – NYTimes.com
  ‘Asians have surpassed Hispanics as the largest wave of new immigrants to the United States, pushing the population of Asian descent to a record 18.2 million and helping to make Asians the fastest-growing racial group in the country… While Asian immigration has increased slightly in recent years, the shift in ranking is largely attributable to the sharp decline in Hispanic immigration.’
• The Game Design of Everyday Things: Buttons – Kill Screen
• Getting Lucky: Hard-Core Gamers Penetrate Peggle’s Physics
  ‘Hard-core players are comfortable mentally manipulating Peggle’s complex physics. They can build models about where the ball is going to go, even after the seventh or eight collision. A frustrated casual gamer looks at Peggle and sees chaos; a hard-core one sees causality.’
• Writers’ Panic « LRB blog
  ‘If you think you’ve got writers’ block after 45 seconds of not writing, you don’t need an app, you need someone gently to tell you that you should consider the possibility that writing is not just about writing, it’s also (and maybe mainly) about the space in between the writing, when nothing seems to be happening, or random stuff is having an incoherent party inside your head.’

Links via http://delicious.com/joshleejosh/

• Eludamos Vol 6, No 1 (2012)
  ‘The objective of the recent fifth [Future and Reality of Gaming] Conference was to explore the phenomena of applied playfulness in our society.’
• Tetris: can a Cold War classic evolve for the touchscreen? | The Verge
  ‘You are constantly aware of the “controls”—in this case, the touchscreen—in a way you are not on the arcade or console version. As a result, getting into the glazed eye zone where you are almost one with the game is difficult, if not impossible.’

Links via http://delicious.com/joshleejosh/